~ Speed is Just a Number

Category Archives: general

We have coffee and tea vending machines in our office. One of the common problems is that we run out of spoons that help us dissolve the sugar in our chosen beverage.

While many times I drink tea and/or coffee without sugar, when I wanted sugar, it presented a problem. One solution is to take a spoon, wash it in hot water from the machine and use it to stir the beverage.

But, when there are no spoons, it does present a problem . . . For which I found a simple solution.

Each vending machine has a spout that allows us to pass steam through the beverage, allowing us to heat it a little more. This feature of the machine can also be used to stir the beverage, effectively causing the sugar to dissolve.

After removing the numbers from each entry, I realized that there were duplicates. Hence, to get the final list, I had to sort the list and get unique entries. Hence I wrote one more Python program to go from this

import osimport os
if __name__ == "__main__":
uniqueLines = set()
with open("s-v1-out-2.txt") as file:
#with open("s-v2-out-2.txt") as file:
for line in file:
line = line.strip()
uniqueLines.add(line)
for l in sorted(uniqueLines):
print(l)

The device contains many old Hindi film songs and is very comfortable for the older generation, who is not comfortable with mobile phones.

While the device is loved by my parents, knowing that is contains 5000 (as claimed by the product) songs is not enough. I wanted to know which songs were on the device. Hence I downloaded the PDF version of the song list from the product website.

A few years ago, one of the gadgets that caused this ‘purchase rethink’ was the Samsung Galaxy Tab 2.

Those days, I had purchased the Samsung Galaxy 3 (after much research for features and the price, obviously) – my first Android smartphone — in fact my very first smartphone.

Due to the phone, I got into the habit of reading ebooks on the smartphone. The phone was actually a boon for me, as I love to read books. As I was accustomed to reading books on the computer screem, reading on the smartphone was not so different. In fact, due to formats like epub / mobi / kindle, it was easier to read a book on the smartphone. I was no longer constrained to the PDF books.

Given my reading habits, my family pursuaded me to purchase a tablet. The reason? Screen real estate – which was limited on the 3.2 inch Galaxy 3 – but quite enough on the seven inch Galaxy Tab 2.

I in my infinte wisdom, decided to go for the ‘phone’ enabled version of the tablet. In other words, I decided to opt for the costlier version that allowed the tablet to function like a phone, instead of the pure tablet version (which had WiFi support). The cost difference? The phone version was 1.5 times costlier than the plain version.

On the positive side, the book reading experience was great on the Galaxy Tab 2.

The reason for rethink? There are two.

Within a few days I realized that purchasing the phone version was a mistake. Operating the tablet like a phone was rediculous. Holding the seven inch tablet to the ear is sight to see due to its dimensions. Reason for rethink number one.

As the next logical step, I moved on from the 3.2 inch Galaxy 2 to the Samsung Galaxy S4 Mini, with a screen size of 4.3 inches. Lavish as compared to the Galaxy 2. Now that I had a high resolutio screen, I found that reading books on the phone was once again pleasurable. This is reason number two.

As it is not possible to consume the whole bottle in one go, we need to cap the bottle and keep it for later. But, the cola loses its fizz, as it is no longer under pressure inside the cola and the cola itself goes flat.

To preserve the fizz, I poured the cola from one bottle into two smaller bottles. One of the bottles was a smaller cola bottle, while the other one was a juice bottle. After some time, I noted that that the juice bottle had its sides bulging out.

I realized that this was happening due to bottle design.

The larger cola bottle and the smaller cola bottle essentially are tubes. but the juice bottle was a square. Due to their tube / circle design, the gas in the cola puts equal pressure on the sides of the cylinder. But in case of square design of the juice bottle, there is unequal pressure. There is more pressure on the walls of the bottle as compared the corners.